Aah....how could I miss this excellent post?! Anyway, better late than never. The wit, sarcasam and humor of your post is fantastic, and totally on the point. But I have a serious point to make :) Yes, our culture is not weak that it can be so easily shaken by those ill-informed books, non-sensical portrayals in films etc. And I am totally with you on the positives that we should be working on (like not defacing our monuments, protecthing and preserving our heritage temples, encouraging and promoting classical art forms etc.). But I still feel that there is a need for a strong, well-informed, well-articulated defense. I say this because in present times the global discourse on global cultures is still very asymmetric. And culture as a soft power is commonly used for the purposes of international and foreign policy purposes. I am not saying this, many serious thinkers have been documenting this for quite a while now. Of course you would know that I am not speaking of the sort of misinformed and misapplied aggression that protestors of valentines day and those advocating covering up women etc. Every time a book that speaks of Shiv-lingam as phallus (and only that, and nothing else) is used as a textbook in a classroom in the US or anywhere else in the world, a seed for the misperception of Hinduism is planted in young minds right there ! And this is just one small example, there are many such things that happen on regular basis. It is such things that need to be challenged and challenged strongly.

Beloo! I differentiate between the 'preserving' means of upholding culture and the 'destruction' means. A true response to an ill-informed book about our culture IS a well-informed one that gets written and widely circulated and NOT burning copies and filing cases to ban the book. What the latter does is ensure that THAT book gets more publicity and higher circulation than before, if not within this country outside the country.

In other words, I would rather that we ignore these things, by way of not even referring to them, and concentrated on building a better understanding of our own culture among both our people as well as others. In that, what I mean is that we do tackle the arguments posited by these people but NOT in direct reference so as to be seen to be making a defense. To me, the idea of defending my culture against ill-informed people is to give too much stature to ill-informed nuts :)

Totally with you on this point about not giving too much or any publicity to the ill-informed nuts. And also on the point about doing well informed critiques of controversial books. But my concern still remains that the nuts who oppose a certain book or film and demand their ban and pulping get more publicity in our asymmetric discourse than the well-researched critique. This makes the problem even worse. Ultimately I agree the best defense is to strengthen our own bonds with our cultural roots and encourage others to do the same through meaningful education. But unfortunately there is a lot of apathy, ignorance and indifference among the so-called educated Indians about their own roots.